I started writing almost as soon as I learned how to read. When I was seven-years-old, I managed to work my way through Alice in Wonderland because I was enamored with the illustrations but got sucked in and entranced by the story. After that it was an obsession with Nancy Drew books and I created my own adventures with the famous child sleuth, Lorraine Velvet. I found the Anne of Green Gables series and The Outsiders. I wrote a letter to Walt Disney imploring him to make a movie from C. W. Anderson’s novel Afraid to Ride, stating that I would be happy to star in the film.
I absorbed everything but it was when I discovered short stories in the old Girl Scout publication American Girl that I found my real obsession. I graduated from my mother’s Redbook magazines to the New Yorker. For Christmas each year, I asked for the current Best American Short Stories, a typewriter, and a horse. The horse never came but the books and the typewriter did. I started submitting to magazines when I was still in high school, collecting rejection slips like baseball cards in a shoebox.
Short stories are my first love. I have written a bad novel and am currently working on a better one. But I will always continue to write short stories. And I hope you enjoy the ones I share on these pages.
